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Archaeology's future lies in 3D scanning the past

Rupert Till from the University of Huddersfield has released an app that recreates the soundscape of the ancient temple as it would have originally been heard thousands of years ago, complete with the sounds of the Wilsford bone flute unearthed in a pit near the site, and the songs of owls, nightingales and corncrakes common to the region in Wiltshire. Till is one of a growing group of researchers which believes one of the core reasons for Stonehenge’s existence was its acoustic properties.

The ancient site, erected almost 5,000 years ago in the late Neolithic period, has remained a compelling mystery. In the 1920s, it was discovered that some of the nine-metre-tall, 25-tonne bluestones that make up the site were hauled almost 200 miles from the Preseli Hills in western Wales. The seemingly impossible logistics of how this occurred has confounded archaeologists, but a group of "archaeoacoustics" have instead been investigating the reason why the stones were moved this great distance.

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In 2014, the Landscape and Perception Project at London's Royal College of Art tested thousands of stones at the Carn Menyn ridge in Wales and discovered that bluestones have incredible sonic properties, and can “ring” like a bell when hit. “You can almost see them as a pre-historic glockenspiel, if you like, and you could knock them and hear these tunes.” professor Tim Darvill, an expert on Stonehenge, told the BBC at the time. "And soundscapes of pre-history are something we're really just beginning to explore."

EMAP Soundscape

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Researchers from the Universities of Salford, Huddersfield and Bristol, have been looking into this phenomena for close to a decade, digitally recreating soundfields using mathematical acoustic analysis gathered from lidar data of Stonehenge. In 2011, the fruits of this labour were unveiled at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, where visitors could walk through an immersive replica of the monoliths and listen to the ancient sounds of music, people and wildlife.

As part of the preparation for this, the research teams travelled to Maryhill in the US state of Washington, where a full-size concrete reconstruction of Stonehenge was built as a First World War memorial. Experiments carried out here resulted in a more accurate soundscape replica, because the stones were not degraded and look more as they were originally intended. Till and colleague Bruno Fazenda walked around the space strumming replicas of Neolithic instruments and listening to the resonant sounds.

Complementing this, Till put together a digital model of Stonehenge to create more acoustic analyses, in the same way an architect might. Till likened the resulting acoustics as being comparable to a world-class concert hall. Stonehenge, he estimated, would have suited “loud rhythmic music, much like a rock concert venue”.

EMAP Soundscape

These years of study and analysis, have been poured into Soundgate, an app Till has now released for Android and iOS. The project is also available for PC and Mac. On his blog, he explains: “There are a number of computer game-like walkarounds for different historic sites, but what is new with our app is the ability not only to see what a site like Stonehenge used to look like, but also to be able to hear what it used to sound like, by integrating acoustic modelling. Also, the use of recordings of relevant ancient musical instruments is very new”.

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Within the Soundgate app, three World Heritage Sites have been modelled: Stonehenge; prehistoric caves in Spain; and the Paphos Theatre in Cyprus. Each tries to give a sense of what it would have been like to stand in these locales thousands of years ago. Around half of Stonehenge’s original stones are now missing, but in Soundgate people can view the site as it likely looked in 3,000BC as a circular ditch with one large stone, in 2,900BC with a circle of bluestones from Wales, in 2,500 BC when larger, local stones with the iconic lintels were installed, and finally 2,200BC with bluestones dotted amongst the larger ones. The app allows users to move through these time zones, switch between day and night, and listen to the corresponding changes in sounds.

Speaking to Reuters, which first reported on the app, Till said: “You have a sense of reverberation, a bit like a gigantic bathroom. People say 'well, you hear that anywhere'. But not two-thousand, three-thousand years ago; there weren't any large stone buildings. So this would have been one of the few human-made places where you'd have heard these kind of acoustic effects."